{"id":126987,"date":"2018-06-29T11:00:01","date_gmt":"2018-06-29T15:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=126987"},"modified":"2018-06-29T11:43:38","modified_gmt":"2018-06-29T15:43:38","slug":"tommy-orange-and-the-new-native-renaissance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/29\/tommy-orange-and-the-new-native-renaissance\/","title":{"rendered":"Tommy Orange and the New Native Renaissance"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo credit: Elena Seibert<\/p><\/div>\n

On a June afternoon, Tommy Orange, author of There There<\/em><\/a>, one of this summer\u2019s breakout books, stood at the foot of the stage at the Fellowship of Humanity, a lavender-interiored church on 27th<\/sup> Street in Oakland, California. Behind him, a banner congratulated this year\u2019s graduating class of East Bay Native American high school seniors. It read: \u201cThe students of today are the warriors of tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Orange hates public speaking. With his head buried in his notes, he intoned, \u201cAs Native people we have a bad history with schools, with institutions. They\u2019re still teaching history wrong. We still hear them saying: \u2018just get over it already,\u2019 even when they\u2019re saying they know the feeling is there. Get over what? The mountain that is history?\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Orange wore navy Nike high tops, a navy button down shirt to match, acid washed jeans and a black fitted cap with the iconic Port of Oakland crane (inspiration for the imperial walkers in Star Wars) and \u201cThe Town\u201d in stylized cursive above its bill. His look, like his words, were authentic to this city\u2014our shared hometown, The Town\u2014<\/strong>in a way that feathers, fringe, beadwork and mystical proclamations just aren\u2019t. Everything about his person was Native to Oakland, troubling assumptions about both those things: Natives and Oakland. \u201cIt is an exciting time to be Indigenous,\u201d he said, addressing the graduates. \u201cWe need you to help make this world a better place for your little brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, cousins, whether they\u2019re here yet or not.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the release of his acclaimed debut novel\u2014which follows the struggles of Oakland Indians as their lives converge at a local powwow\u2014Orange places himself in the vanguard of what some have described as a \u201cNative Renaissance.\u201d<\/a> This wave in Native literature includes memoirist Terese Mailhot from the Seabird Island First Nation, who is the New York Times<\/em> bestselling author of Heart Berries<\/em>;<\/em> Billy-Ray Belcourt, a Driftpile Cree poet who just became the youngest-ever winner of the Canadian Griffin Prize for his first book This Wound is a World<\/em>; and a community of emerging writers schooled in Indigenous movements and educated in institutions like the Santa Fe Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA), where Orange and Mailhot were classmates in the MFA program.<\/p>\n

This new generation is heir to the first \u201cNative Renaissance,\u201d which spanned from the 1960s to 1990s, and included the likes of N. Scott Momaday, whose House Made of Dawn<\/em> won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Sherman Alexie, who published his first two collections of poetry in 1992. That first renaissance included many others with a talent for words, like Leslie Marmon Silko, Lee Maracle, Louise Erdrich and Joy Harjo. But those three decades of Indigenous literary proliferation, collaboration and competition ended as many emerging-market booms do: in monopoly. From the 1990s onward, Alexie dominated the Native lit scene, and was elevated by the media to the dubious status of racial spokesman. In a 2017 interview with NPR\u2019s Terry Gross, Alexie joked that he had been \u201cIndian du jour<\/em>\u201d for \u201ca very long day.\u201d<\/p>\n

In March, ten women accused Alexie of sexual misconduct that ranged from unwanted advances to harassment, suggesting that patriarchy and old-fashioned exploitation may have played a hand in keeping Alexie atop the American Indian writing world for a quarter century.<\/p>\n

As a Native kid growing up in the 2000s, I was an Alexie fanatic. I emulated his style through high school and beyond, and as a young journalist, I frequently referenced<\/a> his work<\/a>. For aspiring Natives-of-letters like me, Alexie was a hero. Through recurring characters like Thomas Builds-The-Fire, Victor Joseph and Junior Polatkin, he wrote the junker-littered Spokane reservation to life in gritty detail, spinning Native storylines into critically acclaimed fiction. The downfall of his irreverent voice and tragicomic take on the novel, which came as close as any I ever read to the truth about our Indian condition, felt personal. \u201cIn the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts,\u201d he wrote in the 1996 poem \u201cHow to Write the Great American Indian Novel.\u201d When I read that line for the first time in my senior year high school English class, I underlined it and damn near stood up in my chair to proselytize its genius to my non-Native classmates. I wanted to wield words like Alexie, who could lay waste to a national colonial literature with one sentence.<\/p>\n

But Alexie\u2019s fall also felt necessary. We, the community of Indigenous writers coming up behind him could not rise with him on top. Alexie had grown into an Indigenous super-ego\u2014an authorial autocrat who set the stylistic standards and shaped the careers of the Native writers who toiled, often in obscurity, below him. And as the years wore on, his ironic laugh-and-burn style seemed to settle into a formulaic shtick. Today, Alexie\u2019s portraits of reservation life read more like simulations of rez-y-ness than windows into what our relatives are actually going through. \u201c<\/em>Hey Victor!<\/em><\/a>\u201d<\/em> the percussive and oft-repeated-rez-accent-inflected expression of Thomas Builds-The-Fire, the protagonist of Alexie\u2019s Reservation Blues<\/em>, has become a running inside joke in Indian Country\u2014an Indian \u201cDamn Daniel<\/a>\u201d or \u201cBye, Felicia<\/a>\u201d that took-off in Native subculture before memes were a thing. But translated to the page and screen, Alexie\u2019s exaggerated rez accent never felt true. That was the joke\u2014we laughed because Alexie\u2019s Thomas Builds-The-Fire tried too hard. He was corny.<\/p>\n

The #MeToo movement has done for Native literature what a healthy publishing landscape should have done years ago: it killed Sherman Alexie\u2019s career. For our Indigenous literary and intellectual community to thrive, Alexie\u2019s day needed to end.<\/p>\n

Like their seventies-and-eighties-era pre-Alexie forebears, Orange and his peers have arrived on the scene at a moment of escalating Indigenous activism as witnessed at Standing Rock in 2016. In a cultural moment defined by fear of ecological apocalypse, democratic decline and legitimized white supremacy, newfound interest in Native writers\u2014who speak with the authority of a people who lived through genocide and survived to talk about it\u2014makes sense.<\/p>\n

If one can cite a silver lining coming out of the Trump era, it\u2019s this: a rekindled inclusion imperative. Orange signed with the super-agent Nicole Aragi, whose clients include Edwigde Danticat, Colson Whitehead and Jonathan Safran Foer, just three days after Trump took office. He nearly sold There There<\/em> to Sarah Jessica Parker for an undisclosed amount in the high-six-figures before taking the novel to auction and landing a deal with Knopf. (When he told me the amount, I exclaimed, \u201cHoly Fuck!\u201d) The New Yorker<\/em> excerpted a chapter for its March 26th<\/sup> issue under the headline \u201cThe State.\u201d The week before the book dropped, the New York<\/em> Times<\/em> published a profile of its author.<\/p>\n

Visibility means little without talent, which Orange and his contemporaries have in spades. There There<\/em> is a work of lyrical panache and structural ambition. Each chapter focuses on a different character. Their lives intertwine through Oakland\u2019s Native and part-Native communities, converging at the fictional \u201cBig Oakland Powwow\u201d at the Oakland Coliseum. Some come to reunite with relatives in song and dance, while a few hustlers plot a grand heist of the powwow\u2019s prize money. There There<\/em> is like a Native take-off on Quentin Tarantino\u2019s Pulp Fiction<\/em>. And when I described it that way to Orange, he agreed: \u201cI love Quentin Tarantino.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many characters are unforgettable. There\u2019s Tony Loneman, a Cheyenne MF Doom fan with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, which he calls \u201cThe Drome,\u201d who has been recruited by his homies to help with a powwow robbery. Orange pens a devastating description of Loneman in the character\u2019s voice, \u201cMy eyes droop like I\u2019m fucked up, like I\u2019m high, and my mouth hangs open all the time. There\u2019s too much space between each of the parts of my face\u2014eyes, nose, mouth, spread out like a drunk slapped it on reaching for another drink.\u201d Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, a veteran of the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz, postal worker and rape victim who occasionally taps into her Indian grandmother survival wisdom to protect her family\u2014a real Indigenous superpower if ever there was one\u2014is another standout.<\/p>\n

There are many characters here\u2014too many despite the fact that Orange edited a few out. While reading the book\u2019s grand finale, a heart-pounding series of rapid-fire scenes that jump from one character to the next, I found myself flipping back to earlier chapters to remind myself who was who. But upon further reflection, even that expectation\u2014that you, the reader, will remember each and every one of these Indians\u2014feels like a statement: Remember us. We matter.<\/p>\n

What is perhaps most exciting about Orange and his peers is that they are unafraid to break old molds of theme, style and structure handed down by the earlier generations\u2019 greatest Indian hits. Orange\u2019s book is set in the city, eliding the reservation dispatches that have dominated Native fiction over the decades. Today, more than seven out of ten Native people live in cities. With There There<\/em>, Native lit is catching-up to demographic reality.<\/p>\n

Orange, Mailhot and Belcourt\u2019s books also bend genres. There There<\/em>\u2019s prologue, a meditative essay on the terrible symbolic power of Indian-head Americana, is one of its most memorable sections. Mailhot\u2019s hard-hitting Heart Berries<\/em> is unusually short for a memoir, more poetry than non-fiction. Belcourt\u2019s This Wound is a World<\/em> is full of references to Indigenous and queer theory and is as much a set of critical theses about our colonial present as it is a collection of poems.<\/p>\n

Circumstances, institutions and relationships have aligned to catalyze a resurgence in the world of Indigenous letters. \u201cThe institution of writing has been based in whiteness for so long,\u201d Orange told me. \u201cTo have a Native writing program [at IAIA] and to be around a community of Native writers is really amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over lunch, Orange spoke of Mailhot, his close friend and classmate, with admiration. The two exchanged work during their time together at IAIA and sold their books just two weeks apart in February 2017. Mailhot\u2019s memoir, published from Counter Point Press\u2014a tiny independent publisher based in Berkeley\u2014beat the odds to become a bestseller. \u201cShe was just like a little bottle rocket that exploded,\u201d Orange said of his friend. Orange also expressed interest in Belcourt\u2019s work, and just got a copy of This Wound is a World<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an exciting time to be a Native writer,\u201d Orange told me, riffing on his graduation speech from the night before. Then he finished the last of his pot stickers and hustled off to his next book talk.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Julian Brave NoiseCat<\/a>\u00a0(Secwepemc\/St’at’imc) is a writer and organizer based in Washington, D.C. He is a contributing editor for<\/em>\u00a0Canadian Geographic\u00a0and his\u00a0work has appeared in publications including\u00a0<\/em>The Guardian, The Nation\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0High Country News.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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